'ILOVEYOU' worm turns to States
Sites large and small across the United States and Canada are reporting aggressive sorties by the worm, which is transmitted as an attachment in Microsoft Outlook.
"It is in the U.S," wrote "soccerguy," an Atlanta software developer. "Our company got hit via our Dublin office."
Reader Finnian Lennon also reported an unwelcome package from Dublin, Ireland. "I can't believe I ran the damn thing but I thought it was more baby pictures from my niece in Dublin (from whom the e-mail came)," he wrote. "However, when three more copies of the e-mail came right behind, I got suspicious.
"A few minutes later I noticed my hard drive was spinning, so I shut down that PC. I called her right away -- "All Europe is down," she said. A slight exaggeration, perhaps, but it's certainly spreading like crazy.
"Fortunately I don't use Outlook and never will, but I know others can't afford to do that," Lennon wrote. "There ARE benefits in diversity."
IT professionals are reporting that their sites are being hit repeatedly by ILOVEYOU. "Twelve of these mails in 5 minutes in a corporate network in Columbus, Ohio," wrote Marco Arment, a Columbus PC technician.
"Just got five copies from five different people all in the last 15 minutes," wrote E. Karsten Smelser, a senior DBA in Minneapolis. "This one is spreading fast!"
"It's in Minnesota," agreed "lpmiller," a "tech guy" based there. "I had 90 copies of it in my box this morning. I'm thinking our mail server might be taken down soon; they keep coming."
"Love hit us this morning," Joa Ann Sauter of Raleigh, N.C., reported. "We're on a WAN, so it spread really rapidly."
"Our mail servers in Chicago have also been affected," wrote "Jumbo," a Buffalo Grove, Ill., systems analyst. "All mail servers are shut down.
"Someone has a lot of time. Maybe Symantec can hire him or her."
When contemplating ILOVEYOU's speedy spread, some readers castigated Outlook users for failing to heed the warnings of Melissa, another pernicious invader spread via e-mail enclosures. "Normal people learn from their errors. Microsoft users apparently belong to another category," wrote Charles Bueche, a system and net engineer based in Switzerland. "After Melissa, lots of security specialists predicted that the worst had yet to come.
"Now that ILOVEYOU has popped up, I just have to wonder why all these autostart script systems are still enabled all around the world. Wake up, and start to think whether Microsoft should really stay your office-tool vendor."